Forest fires occurrences and burned area in mainland Portugal: preliminary asse...

• Author(s): Castro, Ana Cristina Meira ; Bento-Gonçalves, António ; Vieira, António ; Lourenço, Luciano ; Fernandes, Sofia ; Nunes, Adélia
• Date: 2015
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/4607
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico do Porto
• Subject(s): Burned area; Fire occurrence; Forest fires; Portugal; Principal components analysis
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Portugal, as well as the Mediterranean basin, is favorable to the occurrence of forest fires. In this work a statistical analysis was carried out based on the official information, considering the forest fires occurrences and the corresponding burned area for each of the districts of the mainland Portugal, between 1996 and 2010. Concerning to the forest fires occurrence it was possible to identify three main regions in mainland Portugal, while the burned area can be characterized in two main regions. Associations between districts and years are different in the two approaches. The results obtained provide a synthetic analysis of the phenomenon of forest fires in continental Portugal, based on all the official information available to date.